Our new issue is slightly delayed, but only for the best of reasons. We’re giving our site a swanky new backend and finalizing formatting on the print edition, which ran well over 100 pages. Don’t worry, it’s at the same cover price, still counts as a single issue, and we’re still in full-color with the ridiculously extravagant paper stock that’s become our calling card.

This time around our designer Remeike Forbes was joined by new art editor Erin Schell and a host of other commissioned artists. We also have quite a few new writers. The main features include a special section “Palestine and the Left” and particularly strong essays from Nicole Aschoff, Megan Erickson, and Sarah Jaffe. Our assistant editors Alyssa Battistoni and Shawn Gude also came through with some stellar material.

In addition to being our longest, I think it’s our strongest and most consistent issue yet. A full preview is below. All credit to the authors and especially Max Ajl and Megan Erickson who served as issue editors this time around.

The new web interface, which will be up next week, is also extremely cool. Subscribers will be able to login to read paywalled articles, change the shipping address on their orders, and so on. After many complaints, we’re finally being better radicals and ditching PayPal too. Any outstanding issue backorders were mailed out today, and our subscriber database has been revamped with the help of our staffers Samantha Miller and Max Thorn.

Print subscribers will receive their issues in a pretty polybag from our distributor just a matter of days after they’re printed.

Almost doubling the length of our issues, making things smoother for our subscribers, and resuming our stream of online content, doesn’t come cheap. Especially given recent postal rate increases, Jacobin is in need of donations from our long-term readers. We’re expanding and upping our game, despite being reliant on an unpaid editorial staff. Anything that comes in, goes to producing content and building the infrastructure to deliver that content. The growing pains are basically over, but we do need a level of financial support to stabilize as a venue and deepen our political critique.

No one asked us to print hundreds of pages a year in a glossy format not exactly suited to an intellectual journal, but the shtick has served us well and we’d like to keep at it.

Editorial

Palestine and the Left

by the Editors

Far more important than meaningless efforts to draw red lines about “one state” or “two states” — both now empty chimeras, so far from substantive realization as to make the entire debate unreal — is to recognize that the precondition for progressive social change is self-determination.

Fellow Travelers

by Bhaskar Sunkara

The strength of the Left is in organization — with it, we could one day contend for power. Without it, Left Forum might as well be Comic Con.

Essays

Imported from Detroit

by Nicole Aschoff

In American auto’s new PR campaign, Clint Eastwood and Eminem tell us to stop whining about the economy and man-up. But the last thing workers need is more tough love.

The Rise of the Machines

by Gavin Mueller

Automation isn’t freeing us from work — it’s keeping us under capitalist control.

Life and Death in the World’s Homicide Capital

by Belén Fernández

From Tegucigalpa, a city ravaged by crime, where radical “law-and-order” forces end up being at the root of the problem.

Honduran Labyrinth

by Todd Gordon and Jeffery R. Webber

In a leftward moving region, the iron fist of Honduras’ Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo makes him Obama’s sort of democrat.

A Day Without Care

by Sarah Jaffe

What does it mean to strike when “production” isn’t the production of widgets, but care for children, the ill or disabled, or the elderly?

When the Union’s the Boss

by Ned Resnikoff

While some level of personal sacrifice on the part of union organizers is inevitable, that can’t justify rendering them powerless over their own workplace conditions.

The Strike That Didn’t Change New York

by Megan Erickson

The Chicago teachers’ strike was a victory for workers around the country. But how do we move from homegrown resistance to a national movement that could ignite a shift in public policy?

The Industrial Classroom

by Shawn Gude

In resisting standardized testing, today’s teachers are part of a rich tradition of struggle against dehumanization in the workplace.

Curriculum for a New American Century

by Will Johnson

What  would a national core curriculum to prepare students for work in the Age of Service look like?

The Problem of Sex

by Laura Tanenbaum

In the absence of radical change, disquiet finds other outlets. Dystopic visions have replaced Shulamith Firestone and Adrienne Rich’s utopian ones.

Back to No Future

by Alyssa Battistoni

What use is playing the long game when the arc of the universe feels so frighteningly short?

Interview

How Does the Subaltern Speak

with Vivek Chibber

Postcolonial theory discounts the enduring value of Enlightenment universalism at its own peril.

Palestine

The Oslo Illusion

by Adam Hanieh

The Oslo Accords weren’t a failure for Israel — it served as a fig leaf to consolidate and deepen its control over Palestinian life.

Against the Law

by Kareem Rabie and Mezna Qato

Through the rise of organizing based on international law, the struggle for Palestinian liberation has been transformed into a question of rights.

A Dishonest Umpire

by  Chris Toensing

Two-state proponents argue that comprehensive peace is only possible with deeper US involvement in the process. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Culture

They Shoot Oscars, Don’t They?

by Eileen Jones

The Oscar ceremony has finally acquired an ideal twenty-first century host in the smirking, tap-dancing, bland-faced Seth McFarlane.

Whores’ Glory

by Charlotte Shane

The reaction to a new film about sex workers tells us more about liberal reviewers than the workers themselves.

Truth Told Through Lies

by Hailey Huget

Zero Dark Thirty is a film that didn’t need to be made — it strives for realism, but ends up rehashing Bush-era tropes about the ‘war on terror.’

Books

The Last Lost Cause

by Jeremy K. Kessler

Was the mid-century dominance of southern Democrats essential to the defeat of Hitler and the triumph of American democracy?

Review of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time by Ira Katznelson